Video streaming on Edison

8 December 2014

My earlier posts on Edison have been building to this, and here is the result: video streaming to a browser from a webcam connected to Edison… all powered by a 9V battery. It’s a relatively simple starter project, and one that I thought would be a nice introduction to Edison, especially if you have some experience with Linux and Node.js.

The setup involves connecting a UVC-compatible webcam and supplying external power to Edison (see this post). A Node.js web server runs on Edison, listens for the incoming video stream via HTTP (the video is encoded with ffmpeg), and broadcasts the stream to all connected browsers via WebSockets. The video is then decoded on the client-side using jsmpeg and rendered onto a canvas element.

The setup instructions and source code are available on GitHub, and it is also on the Intel Edison Project Gallery. Hopefully, this will help with getting a bit more comfortable tinkering on Edison.

Here’s a video of it in action:

One last thing… for those who have read my post on real-time face detection using OpenCV and Node.js, it might be a fun follow-up project to get this to run on Edison. You may need to lower the frame rate to 1fps (in socket.js) to get it to run successfully. An even more fun follow-up would then be to figure out ways to increase the frame rate.